News

Warmest welcome to our new graduate student group members: Clark Luckhardt, Cameron Miller, Eric Stone, and Coleman Tolliver. We look forward to collaborating with you.

Lavina recently won the best poster award at the Gordon Research Seminar on High Temperature Corrosion held at Colby Sawyer College, July 20-21. Her winning poster was entitled "Selective Oxidation in a High Entropy Carbide Ultra-High Temperature Ceramic." Nice work!

Bekah recently defended her PhD dissertation entitled "Mitigation Strategies for Calcium Magnesium Alumino-Silicate Attack on Environmental Barrier Coatings." Congratulations on a job well done!

Katie Detwiler is a 2019 recipient of the prestigious SMART Scholarship, a Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to develop and retain talented, innovative, and brilliant scientists, engineers, and researchers. Congratulations Katie!

Lavina starts a 10 week planetary science internship at JPL focusing on ice morphology on Europa. Congratulations on this exciting opportunity.

Six members of the group (Bekah, Cory, Lavina, Rachel, Mackenzie, and Katie) head off to Florida this January to attend the 43rd International Conference and Exposition on Advanced Ceramics and Composites in Daytona Beach and the 43rd Annual USACA Conference on Composites, Materials, and Structures in Cocoa Beach. They will make eight presentations describing their latest research on CMCs, EBCs, and UHTCs. Enjoy sunny Florida!

Check out "Thermochemistry of volatile metal hydroxides and oxyhydroxides at elevated temperatures" by Myers, Jacobson, Bauschlicher and Opila, published in the Journal of Materials Research! http://doi.org/10.1557/jmr.2018.425

Replacement of the melt-infiltrated (MI) silicon with a rare-earth silicide offers the potential to address both limitations of SMI CMCs. This study focuses on the ability of yttrium silicides to form yttrium silicates (phases with greater stability in high-temperature water vapor than SiO2) in high-temperature oxidizing environments. Read More...

Check out Bekah's new paper "The effect of TiO2 additions on CaO-MgO-Al2O3-SiO2 (CMAS) crystallization behavior from the melt", and
Lavina's new paper "Thermodynamic Assessment of the Group IV, V, and VI Oxides for the Design of Oxidation Resistant Multi-Principal Component Materials".
Congratulations to both!

Bekah's work on CMAS was highlighted by UVA Engineering. From the article, "Webster's research on new environmental barrier coatings designs for silicon-carbide-based ceramic matrix composites is sponsored by Rolls-Royce. UVA is home to one of three Rolls-Royce University Technology Centers in North America developing technologies for aerospace and advanced manufacturing, and Opila is the director of the UVA CENTER." Read the article here.